The
Armenian Genocide was a systematic extermination that occurred during
World War One, mostly in 1915. The killers were Ottoman Turks: agents
and soldiers of that government, as well as eager civilians.

The
slaughter took place in two phases. First was the wholesale killing of
able-bodied Armenian males through massacre and forced labor. Afterward
came the deportation of women, children, the elderly and the infirm, on
death marches into the Syrian Desert.

All
told, perhaps 1.5 million people were killed. The vast majority of
these were Armenians, but the Turks also killed large numbers of
Assyrian Christians, Greeks, and other minority groups. In many ways -
including that of medical experiments on victims - the Armenian Genocide
was the direct forerunner of the Nazi Genocide against the Jews.

Here is one miniscule part of the slaughter - a photo taken by an American diplomat, to which he added a commentary:

Source: Wikipedia

"Scenes
like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring
and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms--massacre,
starvation, exhaustion--destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The
Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of
deportation."

The Test

The test, believe it or not, is whether people will acknowledge this as a genocide or not.

We
live, as I have complained many times, in an age where institutions not
only reign over money and lands, but also over men's minds. And, as it
turns out, Armenia is not big enough or threatening enough to matter.
And so, the institutional line - world-over and even in some shocking
places - has been that "we don't talk about it."

The
Turkish government, desperate to protect its image, has battled long
and hard to explain it all away, and to prevent the word "genocide" from
being used. Many, many institutions - tossing aside truth for political
expediency - have parroted the Turkish line.

A Turkish official, tormenting starving Armenian children with a piece of bread. (Source: Wikipedia)

The Two Biggest Flunkees

Not
everyone has flunked the test. Several European nations have made
official statements on the Armenian Genocide, as have a few nations on
every continent. Wikipedia lists 22 nations in all (out of 200).

What
I want to focus on here, however, are the two big failures... places
that are supposedly dedicated to an ancient philosophy that would
instantly and irrevocably condemn the Armenian Genocide as a top-tier
evil.

The first failure is the United States.

In an article I wrote earlier this year,
I told how my editor (I was then writing for a major publisher) was
made to change history textbooks to cut coverage of this story down to
just a couple of paragraphs. The US State Department told him to do so
because "we need to keep the Turks happy." My editor's bosses sided with
the government - as people with government contracts nearly always do.
Thus the truth, again, became a casualty to institutions.

The
one US President to use the word "genocide" was Ronald Reagan, in a
speech he made on April 22, 1981. The current US President, Barack
Obama, used the word while a candidate for the presidency, but has
repetitively refused to use it since. Again, truth dies where
institutions reign.

It
is of some interest that Reagan, who was a plebeian - not of the elite -
was the one exception. Whatever the man's virtues or vices, he was far
less an institution man than presidents of more recent years.

The second flunkee is Israel. That the victims of the signature genocide would fail to recognize the one just before theirs is nothing short of tragic.

Certainly
many Israeli and Jewish groups do acknowledge the Armenian Genocide
(such as the Union for Reform Judaism), but the Knesset (the Israeli
legislature) decided that recognition of this as a genocide would
jeopardize relations with the Turks and the Azerbaijanis.

The
reason I call this "tragic" is that by refusing to say "genocide," the
ruling Israeli institution turned its back on the great principle that
the Hebrews gifted to the world several millennia ago: The enthroning of justice above rulership.

While
many individual Israelis are good and decent people, the rulership of
the Israeli state has turned away from the original Jewish principle.

Never Forget

As Adolf Hitler was starting his aggression against the Poles, the London Times quoted him as saying this:

Go, kill without mercy. After all, who remembers the Armenians?

For the sake of decency and for the sake of the future, remember the Armenians.